White Supremacy Culture

What is culture?​Culture refers to the knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving.

Culture is the knowledge shared by a group of people.

Culture is communication, communication is culture.

A culture is a way of life of a group of people--the behaviors, beliefs, values, and symbols that they accept, generally without thinking about them, and that are passed along by communication and imitation from one generation to the next.

Culture is a collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another.

What is cultural racism?Cultural racism is how the dominant culture is founded upon and then shapes norms, values, ​beliefs and standards to advantage white people and oppress People of Color.

Cultural racism is how the dominant culture defines reality to advantage white people and oppress People of Color.

Cultural racism uses cultural differences to overtly and covertly assign value and normality to white people and whiteness in order to rationalize the unequal status and degrading treatment of ​People and Communities of Color.

What is white supremacy culture?White supremacy culture is the idea (ideology) that white people and the ideas, thoughts, beliefs, and actions of white people are superior to People of Color and their ideas, thoughts, beliefs, and actions.

White supremacy culture is an artificial, historically constructed culture which expresses, justifies and binds together the United States white supremacy system. It is the glue that binds together white-controlled institutions into systems and white-controlled systems into the global white supremacy system. ​[from Sharon Martinas and the Challenging White Supremacy Workshop]

White supremacy culture is reproduced by all the institutions of our society. In particular the media, the education system, western science (which played a major role in reinforcing the idea of race as a biological truth with the white race as the "ideal" top of the hierarchy), and the Christian church have played central roles in reproducing the idea of white supremacy (i.e. that white is "normal," "better," "smarter," "holy" in contrast to Black and other People and Communities of Color. For one example of the role of education in reproducing white supremacy culture, read below.

For a more in-depth discussion on "Why Black Lives Haven't Mattered: The Origins of Western Racism in Christian Hegemony," check out Paul Kivel's blog here.

For a more in-depth discussion on "The Doctrine of Discovery, Manifest Destiny, and American Exceptionalism," check out Paul Kivel's blog here.

More About White Supremacy Culture

Culture is powerful precisely because it is so present and at the same time so very difficult to name or identify. Click below for a helpful list of the characteristics of white supremacy culture.read more...